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I’ll assume you’re using Ubuntu on DigitalOcean for this. More info is probably needed here; how have you configured your server?

I’m not familiar with Rust as a game, so bear with me…

If you have a firewall, you need to allow UDP Port 28015 for Rust through.

Try connecting to the server by IP, if that’s possible; if you can open the server from your personal computer, then the issue is the game list.

If you can’t connect by IP, install Nmap and Zenmap on your personal computer. Nmap is a tool for determining which services are active on a server. Open Zenmap as administrator (or if your PC is running Linux, run with sudo zenmap) and set Command to nmap -sU -p28015 <your-server-ip>, then click Scan.

You should see something like this in the output: 28015/udp open unknown. If you see “closed,” then you’ve misconfigured your server or it isn’t really running. If you see “filtered,” then your firewall is the issue. On the other hand, if it is “open” then the issue is with the game list; wait a while, play a few games on it and things should be fine.

Also: make sure you actually installed Rust the game, and not Rust the programming language. Rust the game is a Steam exclusive AFAIK (correct me if I’m wrong) so you need to download and install SteamCMD for Ubuntu before installing Rust. Rust the game is not available via apt.